


Lamentations

by Royalwriter



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Regrets, this is pretty lucretia centric tbh, voidfish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 19:22:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11515809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Royalwriter/pseuds/Royalwriter
Summary: Even after all these years, there are still moments when Lucretia wonders whether saving the world is worth being without her family.





	Lamentations

Even as Madame Director Lucretia has her moments. Where the weight of what she’s done threatens to overwhelm, where she can’t do this anymore, where she needs her family. Where she wonders whether it wouldn’t be worth it to tell them.

Her first slip comes fateful afternoon comes after days of trying to track the location of a relic. She hasn’t slept in longer than she can remember, and nothing about the clues seem to make sense. The locations on the map don’t have any correlation with each other. Black dots blur before her eyes. The marker keeps slipping from her hand. She’s long given up trying to write with both, keeping just this one functional is next to impossible. Tracking was never her job.

The door to her office scrapes across the floor, and footsteps shuffle in. Only Davenport knows how to get into her office without her there. He pauses in the doorway.  
She forgets.

Lucretia turns to Davenport, desperate for any guidance in her bleary state. 

“Captain, do you think this last-” the words stop before her sentence is done, but not before the damage is. 

“Davenport?”

As he stares at her with the same blank look he’s had, the look she forced on him. Endlessly, consistently cheerful, consistently faithful. As he echoes his own name back something inside of her snaps. She did this. She betrayed her captain, she left the smartest most dedicated man she’d ever known a shell of his former shelf. Not the relics, not the hunger, her. 

She could fix it too, could let him drink and stop being alone. Just his help might be enough to fix this. She could make him see reason. Even in her exhaustion though, she recognizes her faulty logic. Davenport would never go for her plan, could never see that she would save them. 

Tears cloud her eyes, and sleep overwhelms. Her knees give out then and she spends the day on the office floor her captain’s name an increasingly concerned echo.  
******  
Lucretia tries not to keep anything from the ship around anymore. But cleaning day comes around and she’s emptying out the very backs of drawers when her hand scrapes against something rough. She pulls out a duck shaped to look just like her.

It should be cute. It would be cute if it wasn’t for the image of Magnus standing in her doorway that flashes before her eyes. The betrayal that flickered across his face. The stagger in his step. Magnus, whose new life even she couldn’t make peaceful. 

She kept an eye on him, but an eye couldn’t keep an enemy sworn on vengeance from destroying his new life. She’d watched as Magnus the protector was away and incapable of protecting the life he’d built. The life that she had built for him. It had been ripped away not even at the cost of a relic. His new life had been destroyed at the whims of fate and there hadn’t been a single damn thing she could do about it.

It would be possible to give him purpose again, to remind him of the other lives he lived and everything that he saw. Give him a hundred years of memories, of another family to soften the blow of the love he’d lost. She could save him.  
Lucretia’s fingers tighten around the wooden duck and she tucks it into her pocket, forcing herself to close the drawer again.  
******

After Merle takes her on the spa retreat, Lucretia almost breaks. She sits in front of the baby void fish’s tank with four empty glasses, and her hands tremble with the urge to fill them. From calling in the three of them and taking her family back before it would be safe to do so. 

She sits on the ground and for a moment she lets herself believe that telling them would bring her family back. That they’d forgive her right away, that they’d understand why her plan was right. That no one would hold a grudge for the parts of their life that she took away. That none of them would be furious that she took them away from each other. At the end of the day she knows it doesn’t matter. Knows that whatever happens is worth the cost, knows that they cannot destroy any world to stop the hunger. Knows that her plan will work. On nights like this though, she’s not sure she cares.

It’s hard to convince herself that it’s worth sitting here alone, when this has taken so much longer than she ever thought it would. When she has been separate from the only other people to ever exist who could possibly understand the scope of what she’s gone through, who could possibly understand the worlds she’s seen. She could lower the barriers, she could let Barry back through and let the other four drink and they could mourn together. She could undo this.

Only for the night does Lucretia let her mind wander down that dangerous path. Her head lays heavy against the void fish’s tank, but in the morning, she wakes nonetheless and continues on. She knows she’s doing what must be done, and she must carry on with it.  
******

When the boys leave for Wonderland Lucretia thinks of Lup. She’d thought of her before too, when she herself was in Wonderland. Lucretia’d wondered if she would die forgotten in that twisted mockery of game, forgotten by the only people who’d ever mattered. In the moment, she realized that she may have condemned Lup to the same fate.

Barry was still out there, even back then Lucretia had known that, known that he’d turned himself into Lich rather than forget. Even still, the odds of him lasting long in that form were slim. The rest of them could exist in their new lives, could keep going but Lup had been gone for so long. Lucretia had faced giving up twenty years of her life, and realized that if she died there would be no one to remember the elf.

As Taako, Merle, and Magnus leave and Lucretia wonders if she’ll ever see them again she remembers saying goodbye to Cam. Remembers betraying someone she’d almost considered a friend for the greater good. And it had been for the greater good, now she understands that more than ever, but, she still sees his face in her dreams sometimes.

Lucretia watches as the cannonball leaves the moon base, and prays that her friends will return with the final relic soon. She prays that she can end this all, and be alone no longer. That they will see why it was worth it, why it was all worth it. Why it has to be worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much just self indulgent Lucretia angst, but if you liked it feel free to leave comments or kudos! They're always appreciated :)


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